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The singer says he feared his daughter might have ended up without a father

Gerard Way has revealed he relapsed into alcoholism after his former band My Chemical Romance released what would be their final album.

The singer, who will release his debut solo album ‘Hesitant Alien’ on September 29, opens up in this week’s NME about how he fell into the self-destructive habits of his 20s shortly after the release of My Chemical Romance’s 2010 LP ‘Danger Days’. He broke up the band, he says, to save himself.

“I relapsed, not into drugs but booze,” he says. “I was self-medicating again to get through, and I’d forgotten how miserable that made me. It took me to the dark place again, but there was more at stake this time. I started to face the hypothetical reality of [daughter] Bandit not having a father. I started taking that seriously, thinking, ‘I want her to have a dad. A guy that’s present. Because one way or another – either by death or by asylum, she’s gonna be fatherless if I keep this up.’”

The choice, he says, was an easy one: “Break the band or break me.”

Earlier this week, Way announced that he will play his first ever solo gig to just 400 fans at Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms on Wednesday night (August 20). He will also perform at Reading & Leeds Festivals this coming weekend (August 22-24).

Gerard Way has shared a new video via Twitter titled Pink Station Zero, which happens to be the name of a “station” from All Ages, a new comic he is working on. In it, an anchor announces that viewers should stay tuned for new music from Gerard Way next week.

The music is, presumably the song “No Shows,” the video for which is set for release next Tuesday, August 19, which is also when pre-orders for Way’s upcoming album Hesitant Alien launch.

The video also features another tiny easter egg for fans who pay attention. In it, the anchor mentions “actress Gina Barbeux,” a name fans will remember having seen in Way’s The Umbrella Academy comics.

As the frontman of My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way seemed to have it all. The next chapter requires something altogether riskier.

It all began with a guitar. My Chemical Romance first came to life when the band’s frontman, their leader-in-waiting, picked up a 90s Fender Mexican Stratocaster in his parents’ basement and wrote their very first song. Twelve years on, as the band were finally drawing to a close, it was that same Lake Placid Blue guitar that Gerard Way turned to.

It’s safe to say that Gerard was stepping into the unknown. For the best part of a decade-and-a-half, he had graced stages around the world, kicking and screaming, sweating and bleeding his way to the most dizzying heights of popularity. He had taken his band out of the dirty basements of New Jersey, tracked down the souls of 1000 evil men, led a deathly army and become his very own superhero. With each of their albums came a new era for the band, and with every new concept, legions of fans would follow. Then, one day, My Chemical Romance became just too big a monster.

“It had,” agrees Gerard. Sat in the basement of a central London hotel, he looks a little different to the last time he was on UK soil. One of the last great accolades of the band saw them headline Reading & Leeds Festival just over three years ago, but gone is the flame red hair and leather jacket that he boasted during their ‘Danger Days’ performance. He’s traded it in for a messy mound of blond locks (for the time being, at least), blue jeans and some beaten up Converse. He looks relaxed, ready for things to set in motion once again, unafraid to admit that the next part of his life began at the end of his last. “There was a large part of me that wanted to escape that bigness, which I came to terms with over time. I learned to accept that it had grown to that and to love it for what it was, despite how big it had gotten. I came to peace with that part, but at the beginning of the break up, for sure, I was trying to escape this largeness.”

“There was a large part of me that wanted to escape.” – Gerard Way

By the time the band called it a day back in March 2013, they had sold over four million albums worldwide, climbed to the top of the charts and headlined festivals on both side of the Atlantic. Their incendiary brand of punk rock – visceral but somehow eloquent, morbid yet enamouring – proudly blurred the lines of niche and mainstream, all the while taunting critics with its moments of bombast and flair. With the release of their third album ‘The Black Parade’ they had grown bigger than ever; they felt unstoppable, a force to be reckoned with in their gothic military uniforms, but when touring drew to a close in 2008, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. “I don’t know how much of a secret this is,” offers Gerard, “and I don’t think it is, but when we finished ‘…Parade’ and we had finished the touring, I didn’t want to do it anymore. That was a nice ending point for me. It was an extremely high note, I had said all I’d wanted to say. There was nothing more for me to say under that umbrella of My Chemical Romance.”

Somewhere along the way, his priorities had changed. With the band growing up and beginning to settle down with their wives and children, he had bigger responsibilities than his own artistic urges. As the project grew, drawing more and more people into the mix, there were less opportunities to walk away, and more depending on him than ever before. “You know, you try to be responsible,” he explains. “You’re becoming an adult and so you think one of those things is, ‘Well, I’m gonna be responsible. We’ve all got mortgages and families now and the right thing to do is to stay in this.’ Then you start thinking about the crew that you help; they work with you and that’s how they make their pay cheque. It gets bigger and bigger. It becomes that machine and then you don’t want to turn your back on anybody, not a single person. So, you go against yourself, you go against what feels right, to ‘be an adult’.”

Having closed the door on ‘The Black Parade’ almost six years ago now, things soon became quiet in the MCR camp. The band – guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, along with Gerard’s bassist brother Mikey – spent time being husbands and fathers, settling in to that new period of their lives. That was until September 2010 at least, when the notoriously catchy, gloriously cartoony trailer for ‘Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)’ burst onto the internet. The band were back, reborn as superhero rogues in a post-apocalyptic land, another concept album firmly in their grasp and another touring schedule spanning way out into the future.

“As a human being you have to understand and deal with the process, not just run away from it,” Gerard reflects. “I wasn’t running away from the bigness, but I wasn’t happy doing it anymore, and it’s not what I wanted for my life anymore. It’s not the kind of father I wanted to be, or husband, or artist for that matter. It’s not who I wanted to be any longer. To go against what your inner-self is telling you – to go against the art like that – and keep grinding it and keep trying to milk it and make it work – not the guys, but me personally – that didn’t feel right. So, everything from the end of ‘…Parade’ to the end of the band just felt like I wasn’t being honest with myself. It was doing serious damage physically and mentally over that time.”

It took the release of fourth album ‘Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys’, their consequential 7” collection ‘Conventional Weapons’, and a performance at New Jersey’s Asbury Park to shake Gerard into action. It admittedly took a while to sink in – as he later went on to explain in a closing letter to fans – but soon enough, he knew that their time was up. “You know,” he muses, “I think being an adult is not necessarily running away from things, but it’s doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. You have to be honest with yourself. I think that’s how you end up with a lot of really unhappy parents, who raise unhappy children that don’t want to be around them. I’d rather make a quarter of what I made in MCR and have [his daughter] Bandit grow up and say, ‘My dad was awesome. He had a great time making art. He loved life, he loved looking at life through a lens, he taught me how to look at life.’ I would much prefer that to, ‘Yeah, I kinda see my dad. He drives a Porsche, he doesn’t talk a lot. He’s on the computer a lot. Sometimes he writes comics but not really.’ I was just so unhappy with where I was at, that’s the way it started to become.”

“A lot of it was completely blind flying, and I loved it.” – Gerard Way

It was time for Gerard to pick himself back up again. With the band laid to rest and his mind finally at ease, he was able to turn to that guitar – the same one he had written ‘Skylines and Turnstiles’ on twelve years previously, the same one he had introduced in his closing letter to fans – and start over.

“I knew I would,” he states, without a flicker of hesitation. “I just didn’t know what it was going to be.” At first, the frontman had set his sights on forming a new band. Immediately inspired, he “started cooking up art, and trying to visualise the kind of instruments” they would need. It grew more and more ambitious as his imagination ran wild. “I realised, you’ve gotta take ownership over yourself. You’re not gonna start a band because that’s not gonna work out for you. You’re pretty uncompromising so don’t put yourself in a position that’s based on compromise anymore.”

The birth of Gerard Way’s solo career was as simple as that. It was an opportunity for him to explore the paths untrodden by his former project, all the while looking at things through a different pair of eyes. He didn’t even have a concept in mind, for starters. “When it became a solo thing…” he pauses to think. “Visually there’s a concept but there’s nothing that’s a concept about the album. That’s the first time I’ve ever attempted that; it’s not a concept album at all. It’s nice; it’s a lot more varied because of that. I know My Chemical Romance was very varied, but this feels more so.

“A lot of it was completely blind flying and I loved it,” he enthuses. “It was extremely free. It was sitting with a guitar at a mic and just hitting record, and being like, ‘Alright, let’s hear it back. Okay, let’s do this.’ The opening track of the record was literally just me grabbing my brother’s bass, because it happened to be there, and just playing and building off that. I would do that, and then I’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll take the guitar now. Open me a new track.’ There was just layering and layering and layering and then we’d say, ‘Let’s get some drums on.’ It was really free. It was just grabbing stuff.”

“Is it gonna work? Are people gonna like it? What am I doing? Why did I do this?”

Gerard Way

Not only was it the first real chance for Gerard to be behind the guitar on an album – “when you’re in a band with two really amazing guitar players, you feel weird to wanna play guitar” – it also presented him with the freedom to roam his own, more personal influences for inspiration. “I got to go extremely deep. I knew that if I wanted to make a song that was going to sound like The Jesus and Mary Chain, it could really go that far. When you’re in a band, everybody has a fingerprint and that’s what makes that band special. When it’s just your singular fingerprint on it, you find that you can go deeper with it.” While My Chemical Romance had lurked at the heavier realms of his tastes – from Iron Maiden to Misfits – his new album became a place to explore. “[It has] everything from shoegaze to Britpop, and it’s a very British album. Everything from fuzz rock to noise rock, to experimentation, to Berlin-era Bowie and Iggy stuff. I’ve distilled it into some other thing, and there’s a thread of that throughout the record, but I went deep into my influences.”

Writing the album, dubbed ‘Hesitant Alien’, also allowed for the former frontman to gain his own sense of closure. Having spent over a decade in a band as notorious as My Chemical Romance had become – no one’s forgetting their infamous dalliance with the British tabloids any time soon – the time away, and the songs he wrote, saw Gerard face up to his own personal dilemma: re-discovering his place in the musical landscape. “Definitely each song is its own thing this time. They’re all connected by a sense of alienation and the idea that figuring out where I fit into music was realising that I don’t exactly fit into music, and that’s kinda how I fit.” He laughs, “that’s my role; my role is to be myself and super-unique and not worry about how I fit in. Not in an outsider, rebellious way, but in a celebratory way, saying ‘I’m different, this is what I do, and there’s nobody that does this like I do it, so I’m gonna be the best me I can be.’”

“I started to make the record that I wanted to hear.” – Gerard Way

That’s not to say that Gerard believes it’s plain sailing ahead. There’s always the fear of the new, fear of the unknown, of what could come next. That’s something he’s having to face head on. “Yeah, there’s a fear attached to it,” he agrees. “You have nobody to turn to and say, ‘Is this any good?’ You have nobody to turn to and say, ‘Do I look alright?’ That’s all gone, so you have to really believe in yourself. There’s a good fear that comes with it and there’s a bad fear, and that’s the unknown: ‘Is it gonna work? Are people gonna like it? What am I doing? Why did I do this?’ All that bad stuff, it creeps in!” he laughs. “It comes from a place of fear. Everything that’s the right thing to do is extremely hard. It should be fun, but it should be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, next to having My Chemical Romance break up.”

There’s also the question of his future audience. With My Chemical Romance fans ready and waiting for new music, there’s no shortage of people who’ll undoubtedly give the record a listen, but who is it that’ll stick around? Have their tastes grown to match his, or will they move quickly on? More pressingly, who from outside those boundaries might raise an eyebrow for the ex-frontman of a band who were stuck with a label that’s been more than difficult to shake: who exactly is going to care? “I think I’d like to reach…” he begins, before pausing. “Uhh, it’s weird. I don’t want to…” he trails off, before starting afresh. “I really respect the My Chem fans so it would be nice to carry on the journey with them, but I think it’s gonna go how everything else goes. You’re gonna have a group that likes it, a group that doesn’t like it, and a group that’s very indifferent to it. I do think that because of the influences of the record, maybe some of the sophistication of it, it will appeal to people maybe closer to my age, or in their early 30s at least.

“I know I would listen to this record, and that’s not to say I wouldn’t listen to My Chem records, but My Chem was very different. When we did something in My Chem, it was all gut and psychology. This time, with this album, I was very conscious in my influences and I chased them down very hard. I started to make the record that I wanted to hear, that I wanted to go into a store and buy. It was important for me to bring fuzz pedals back into music. I had a mission this time and it was a sonic one. My Chem had a very socially-driven mission, and now this was, ‘No, I’m gonna get fuzz pedals on the radio. That’s my goal.’ I think audiophiles will like the record a bit more. We got Tchad Blake to mix it; people who are really into mixing will know Tchad’s work very well. Then, Doug [McKean, the album’s producer] and I experimented so much with the tones, so I think people that maybe didn’t like My Chem would like this…

“I think it’ll get a fair shake,” he concludes. “What they feel about it after they’ve listened to it, I won’t know, but I definitely feel like somebody will go, ‘Alright, well I’ll try this dude out and see how it goes.’”

As for the reaction he hopes the album might provoke, it seems to be the mantra that he himself is trying to follow. “I just hope they take away that…” he pauses one last time. “Just to be free, and just to do what you’re feeling, to not over think it. To take the risk, and do the hard things.”

Former My Chemical Romance frontmanGerard Way will release his debut solo album, entitled Hesitant Alien, on September 30th via Warner Bros. Records. The new album will be available for pre-order at all digital retailers beginning Tuesday, August 19th. Exclusive album bundles will also be available for pre-order on GerardWay.com on the same date. Fans who pre-order the album will receive the track “No Shows” instantly as a free download. The music video for “No Shows” will also be released on August 19th. Please see below for the full track-listing.

Working with producer Doug McKean, Way knew immediately what he wanted Hesitant Alien to sound like. “I wanted to make the small things sound big,” he says. “My intention was to make 100 percent uncompromised art, using the currently least radio-friendly instrument, the guitar. I knew there would be lots of fuzz pedals. I knew I would play Fender instruments. I knew I would look at who my guitar heroes were in art school, Mary Timony and Carrie Brownstein, and I drew a lot of influence from shoe-gaze and Britpop. I want the record to sonically galvanize people.” Hesitant Alien was mixed by Tchad Blake (Arctic Monkeys, Black Keys).

Lyrically, Way wrote about what he knew at the time, “which was struggle, beginnings, finding a newness in the mundane and the abstract,” he says. “I looked to the Britpop poets like Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn, drawing upon every day life. I also experimented with the abstract, and looked at Frank Black’s work both with the Pixies, and as a solo artist. There was no concept and no call-to-arms.

Fans will get their first listen to some of the songs on Hesitant Alien when Way performs his first solo shows at the Reading and Leeds Festivals in England. He will perform at Reading on August 22nd and at Leeds on August 23rd.

After releasing his debut solo track, “Action Cat,” and recently speaking about life after My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way has revealed a little more insight into the demise of the band. Speaking in a new interview with Kerrang!, Way revealed that 2006’s The Black Parade was supposed to be the end of MCR. “That was Black Parade, and when the tour basically ended with us conquering the world, we were supposed to ride off into the sunset,” he says.

When asked why the band didn’t end, Way explains how it’s not that simple because of “careers, mortgages, families, crews, people, the machine itself.” Read an excerpt from the interview below, and read the full article on Kerrang!’s website.

“I got sick physically and mentally because I didn’t listen to what my inner self said…” Which was? “Which was when Parade was over, that’s the end. I always said that to myself and I had been relatively vocal about saying that around the rest of the band. I plan things out pretty far in advance. I sat down with a piece of paper before Bullets came out and I wrote. I wrote down titles of records, what they were going to be like and what they were going to accomplish for the band.” So you’d strayed from the plan? Gerard nods. “I never went past the third record because to me the third record was the pinnacle – it was the combination of everything we had learned on one and two but really taken to some crazy extreme. That was Black Parade, and when the tour basically ended with us conquering the world, we were supposed to ride off into the sunset. I can’t think of a better ending than that. And that’s what I internally planned for myself as a human being the whole time – this is it, that’s the end.” The question is, why wasn’t it? “Because it’s a lot more complicated than that. Because you get into careers, mortgages, families, crews, people, the machine itself – not to mention expectations of a record label that invested quite a bit in you, that would like more out of you, a fanbase that wants more out of you. So I kept going, against every fibre in my being, I kept going. I went against myself and I lost…”

G Way will release his debut solo album, Hesitant Alien, sometime this year. While we’re on the topic of The Black Parade, watch MCR perform “Welcome To The Black Parade” at the 2006 VMAs.

It appears that Gerard Way has revealed the title of his upcoming solo album is Hesitant Alien in a new tweet.

Many fans who are familiar with a more cloak-and-dagger approach to album announcements from Way’sMy Chemical Romance days are skeptical, but Wayreassured one concerned party who pointed out that it wasn’t “like [him] at all” to be so up-front, “I know. I wanna change things up.”

We have reached out to a representative for confirmation.

Check the tweet and a hidden-in-plain-sight hint he dropped a while ago below:

Speaking to Kerrang! Editor James McMahon as part of the exclusive six page interview in this week’s new issue of K!, available here, My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way details, for the first time, the phone call that brought MCR to an end.

Gerard explains that he wished the band could’ve been together in a bar somewhere when the conversation to finish My Chem happened. The truth is, he tells Kerrang!, is that the final conversation between the band happened in a short group phone call. ”I wrote this thing. It’s the only way I could say it,” Gerard explains. “It was really brief, and it was very direct, and it was about how I felt.”

Gerard goes on to describe the conversation as “Very quick,” adding that it wasn’t “impersonal”, but it wasn’t “something to talk about a lot. It wasn’t a therapy thing”. To read the full six pages, pick up this week’s issue of Kerrang! from tomorrow.

We’re incredibly excited to tell Gerard’s story for the first time, so head HERE to download the first two pages of the interview for free!

Gerard Way reflects on fan interactions, empathy and the lessons he’s learned nearly a year after My Chemical Romance‘s breakup.

In a new open letter Way prefaces may not be relevant to the “casual follower,” the former MCR frontman opens up about the things he’s learned following the band’s breakup nearly a year ago on March 22—particularly on the nature of opening up oneself as an artist to one’s fanbase.

Circa spring last year, Way became much more interactive with fans, both through snail-mail and social media—particularly on Twitter—where he answered questions, set up art contests and let followers in on lesser-known facts about his art, both relating to and beyond My Chemical Romance.

His reflection is mostly positive, the overarching theme being that he has learned to “restructure how he operates” in the face of the access he has allowed fans. (“As an artist, I am continually reminded and encouraged to be of limited access to the audience. But I found that this is not my way- well, not all of the time.”)

On the positive side of things, Way notes: “I feel now that I know you all more, even if I never responded to you, than I ever did before, and what I have come to know is love, and how different each one of us is, and how much we all have to share.”

However, Way also makes it clear that it’s easy to pinpoint and focus on the negative: “I call it ‘the one-finger’ rule, and a person that possesses a desire for a negative reaction a “one-finger” because it is usually within an audience of a thousand raised sets of hands in togetherness that, if you look hard enough, you will find the one middle-finger extended out. Almost 100% of the time it isn’t negative but the desire for a reaction, which is all any of us really want- a reaction. To be loved.”

One particular negative behavior Way picks out as “disheartening” was “the need to create fantasies of separation,” or the need to pit friends, musicians and fans against each other for amusement.

“It is difficult for people, including myself, to see the truth for what it is- again because it is boring, and it doesn’t agitate or excite us in the same way as a fantasy, like a drug. But in the year, something that stood out was witnessing a fair amount of people try to divide up a situation, like a band, into “camps” or “sides”… If I could say there is any kind of behavior that I would rather not have witnessed it was that. The aims of the confused or bored. But I’m glad that I did because it makes sense- that in all the chaos of a break-up people needed an order of things, and a side to take, fictitious in origin as they may be.”

What do you think? Particularly artists: Have your interactions with fans changed the access levels you allow people to your life or the way you think about those interactions? Let us know!

Read Way’s full letter below:

“It would have been a fairly simple matter to not write a letter. We can often re-establish ourselves through simple action as opposed to words but that hasn’t been my style this year as I have become more open and connected. Which has been, like all things, both positive and negative. And if you are a casual follower then please, go about your normal business unless you feel there might be something in this letter for you. I am very close to having my own place on the web to put things like this.

1 year.

A year in and I had always thought I would take a look at things once it had passed since the breakup of the band. I saw a lot of great things, a lot of honesty and a lot of courage, a lot of self expression through words or art or feelings and it was rewarding to know you are followed, through your art, by people of such passion, conviction, and self awareness.

I have, for some time, felt that connecting too close would bring with it some negative things. Things out of my control but things nonetheless, and of course I was right, though this did not deter me from continuing to be open. But the last few months have felt different. And it wasn’t specifically any one event but the building up of many, and the sound of too much white-noise. Too much access leading to only the same type of confusion and unrest that I have seen throughout the year. But again I want to stress that all of this has been good progress and good learning. Positive and negative.

As an artist, I am continually reminded and encouraged to be of limited access to the audience. But I found that this is not my way- well, not all of the time. Actually it is both in and out of access I need to be. There is a time and a place for both. I have learned this.

When I started being open for the first time in what felt like ages, it truly did feel that it was helping. Helping some of us get through for sure but it also helped me a great deal in accepting things. It became a kind of therapy for me, and even the occasional anger and frustration I would field all added up in my head, creating a large broad-stroke picture.

The thing that was mildly disheartening, and resulting in somewhat of a restructuring of how I operate, is the division, or the need to create fantasies of separation in order to cure anger, boredom, or frustration.

It is difficult for people, including myself, to see the truth for what it is- again because it is boring, and it doesn’t agitate or excite us in the same way as a fantasy, like a drug. But in the year, something that stood out was witnessing a fair amount of people try to divide up a situation, like a band, into “camps” or “sides”. Literally seeking to pull apart the very friends that created the reason we even have a dialogue, why you are even interested. If I could say there is any kind of behavior that I would rather not have witnessed it was that. The aims of the confused or bored. But I’m glad that I did because it makes sense- that in all the chaos of a break-up people needed an order of things, and a side to take, fictitious in origin as they may be.

But I think the thing that I learned the most, and have come to embrace, is the simple fact that you cannot, and will not take everyone with you. As an empath it is in our nature to want to reach everyone, share with everyone, get everyone to love each other to keep the feeling in the room somewhat manageable for the empathetic as opposed to the rollercoaster of extreme emotions which tend to feel like going from feeding ducks in a pond to witnessing a car accident. It’s the same when playing live for ten people or ten thousand. A rush-in of emotion, good and bad, it becomes the performers job to then inspire a positive connection throughout the audience, that they then share, though we can sometimes fail at this, and often it is because of a very vocal and negative minority. The performer lets that bit get through the wall and it starts to fall apart. You have seen it before when going to see your favorite band live. I call it “the one-finger” rule, and a person that possesses a desire for a negative reaction a “one-finger” because it is usually within an audience of a thousand raised sets of hands in togetherness that, if you look hard enough, you will find the one middle-finger extended out. Almost 100% of the time it isn’t negative but the desire for a reaction, which is all any of us really want- a reaction. To be loved.

Know this, that I am aware it exists and I’m also aware it is small. I am aware it is simple noise, easily tuned out if in the right headspace, which we are all capable of. I would like to imagine that all of us, including my friends know this as well. I don’t generalize a tremendous fanbase like this one. It would be naïve. The outpouring of positive emotion and support for an idea and it’s individuals has been unmanageable in it’s size. So thank you.

But it has always been my job to create, not ask you what I should create before I do it, as that would do you an enormous disservice. This time I do not seek a bubble, or to close myself off. I seek to keep the thread alive, but a thread and not an alarm. This year has been a lot of fun and I feel now that I know you all more, even if I never responded to you, than I ever did before and what I have come to know is love, and how different each one of us is, and how much we all have to share.

I’ve got a lot of work to do this year, and I would love it if you joined me but I understand if you cannot. I will be here, creating, regardless, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

My Chemical Romance just debuted “Fake Your Death,” the final song they recorded together, via BBC Radio 1 and are now streaming it on their website.

Fans who pre-ordered the band’s greatest hits CD/DVD May Death Never Stop You through the band’s website will receive a download code for the song, and it will also be available to download on iTunes with the purchase of the full digital album.

Watch the video for “Fake Your Death” below:

Yesterday, guitarist Frank Iero said of the song, “It’s one of my favorites we ever did,” and in arecent statement, former MCR frontman Gerard Way called “Fake Your Death” a “eulogy for the band:”

“…I consider “Fake Your Death” to be the “last MCR song”, and to me, it is absolutely the final fully realized collaboration between the members of the band. Oddly, or fittingly, it was written while the Los Angeles Kings beat the New Jersey Devils and won the Stanley Cup, though this did not inform or inspire the song as I was unaware (along with James and Doug) that this was happening and have only a small interest in sports. After the game, the rest of the band had arrived at the studio where we added elements to its existing structure, fleshing it out some more, and it started to form.What was not so obvious at the time was that the song was, and would serve as, a eulogy for the band, though I should have known it from the lyrics. I think internally I did, as I felt an odd sense of sadness and loss after hearing back the words on top of the music. I also felt a strange sense of pride in how honest it was, and could not remember a band recording a song of this nature, being so self-aware. Ending felt like something honest, and honest always feels like something new.

So it will exist, and it is no cowardly act to release something of this nature, but a service to those who believed in a band that did not compromise, and a wave goodbye to all. And yes, it is fucking heartbreaking.

And while I don’t believe the lyrics of the chorus today- I did at the time, which to me is a core ingredient to the music of MCR. And it is through that belief, and yours, that we were able to achieve many beautiful things.”

—

The song was originally recorded as a part of My Chemical Romance’s incomplete and unreleased fifth album, which the band said was moving in a very “dark” and “bleak” direction during the recording. The album was set to follow the concept of a support group for parents who had lost their children.